Republicans appeal Ga. ruling against 7 last-minute election rules
ATLANTA, Ga. - National and state Republicans have appealed a judge’s ruling that said seven election rules recently ed by Georgia’s State Election Board are “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”
The Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party are appealing a ruling from Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox, who ruled Wednesday that the State Election Board did not have the authority to the rules and ordered it to immediately inform all state and local election officials that the rules are void and not to be followed.
The rules that Cox invalidated include three that had gotten a lot of attention — one that requires that the number of ballots be hand-counted after the close of polls and two that had to do with the certification of election results.
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In a statement Thursday announcing the appeal. RNC Chairman Michael Whatley accused Cox of “the very worst of judicial activism.”
“By overturning the Georgia State Election Board’s commonsense rules ed to safeguard Georgia’s elections, the judge sided with the Democrats in their attacks on transparency, ability, and the integrity of our elections,” Whatley said. “We have immediately appealed this egregious order to ensure commonsense rules are in place for the election — we will not let this stand.”
As president of the state’s association of election officials, Richmond County Board of Elections Executive Director Travis Doss had campaigned against the hand-count rule.
Now he’s glad it’s on hold.
He says the reasoning behind the new rule was transparency, which he agrees with.
He says the issue he has with the rule is the timing.
People are already voting across Georgia.
“When you see that kind of turnout, I feel that it shows the voters are energized,” said Doss.
Scot Turner, a retired Republican lawmaker in Georgia’s General Assembly and current head of the group Eternal Vigilance Inc. was behind the lawsuit against the board.
“The State Elections Board is an executive branch agency. They don’t have the authority to be making new laws and that’s what they were doing,” said Turner. “The timing was obviously problematic but what was more problematic were unelected people deciding to become legislators on their own accord, which is not acceptable in our form of government.”
Despite being a staunch Republican himself, Turner said he was nonetheless concerned with the last-minute changes.
“Because the State Elections Board, one day, could be controlled by Democrats and I don’t want them to have lawmaking authority,” he said. “So doing it now was really appropriate because if we don’t stand up against unelected bureaucrats making law now when we’re in control. When we’re not in control, we’re not going to have a leg to stand on.”
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Alex Kaufman, a lawyer for the state Republican Party, said Thursday that the party filed an emergency notice of appeal with the Georgia Supreme Court.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Eternal Vigilance Action, an organization founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican. The suit argued that the State Election Board overstepped its authority in adopting the rules.
DEKALB CASE:
- A DeKalb County challenge against the Georgia State Election Board has been paused for the time being. On Friday morning, the judge stayed the case, meaning it is temporarily or indefinitely on hold. On Thursday, the county filed a motion to block new election rules the state board enacted on Sept. 20, including hand-counting the ballot. But since Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox declared the new rules “illegal, unconstitutional and void,” the judge argued the DeKalb County challenge is redundant.
“Seeing the Republican Party argue that unelected bureaucrats should have the power to make new law is certainly a departure from traditional conservative values,” Turner wrote in a text to The Associated Press. “But we expected them to appeal and are prepared to fight on behalf of reining in this istrative-state power grab as long as we need to.”
The changes, which ranged from minimal impact to wholesale changes of procedure, were not within the authority of the board to make in the first place, said Judge Thomas A. Cox Jr.
Three Republican of the state election board — who were praised by name by former president Donald Trump at one of his Atlanta rallies this summer — had ed rules including a mandated hand count of ballots in every county on election night, allowing poll watchers access to tabulation areas and a requirement that election s investigate election results before officially certifying them.
They have ed new rules over the objections of the board’s lone Democrat and the nonpartisan chair.
READ THE FULL ORDER:
The other rules Cox said are illegal and unconstitutional are ones that: require someone delivering an absentee ballot in person to provide a signature and photo ID; demand video surveillance and recording of ballot drop boxes after polls close during early voting; expand the mandatory designated areas where partisan poll watchers can stand at tabulation centers; and require daily public updates of the number of votes cast during early voting.
One rule that the judge overturned required that three separate poll workers count the number of Election Day ballots by hand to make sure the number of paper ballots matches the electronic tallies on scanners, check-in computers and voting machines.
Georgia voters make selections on a touchscreen voting machine that prints a paper with a human-readable list of the voter’s choices as well as a QR code. The voter puts that ballot in a scanner, which records votes. The hand-count would be of the paper ballots — not the votes.
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Critics, including many county election officials, argued that a hand-count could slow the reporting of results and burden poll workers at the end of an already long day. They also said there isn’t enough time for adequate training.
The rule’s ers argued the count would take extra minutes, not hours. They also noted that scanner memory cards with vote tallies could be sent to county offices while the hand-count is completed so reporting of results wouldn’t be slowed.
Cox wrote that the rule “is nowhere authorized” by Georgia laws, which “proscribe the duties of poll officers after the polls close. Hand counting is not among them.”
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Two other new rules that Cox invalidated were ed by the State Election Board in August and have to do with certification. One provides a definition of certification that includes requiring county officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, but it does not specify what that means. The other includes language allowing county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.”
ers argued those rules are necessary to ensure the accuracy of the vote totals before county election officials sign off on them. Critics said they could be used to delay or deny certification.
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